When a content providing application such as a word processor or a graphics program sends data to a printing device for printing, the data is first converted by a device driver into a page description language (PDL). PDL describes the contents and layout of the data. There are a number of types of PDL, such as Printer Control Language (PCL)®, Portable Document Format (PDF)®, PostScript (PS)®, and so on. Before a PDL can be printed by a printer, the PDL must be converted into device-ready or raster bits. Raster bits instruct a printer's print engine, which is the electronic circuitry controlling the printer's mechanical printing hardware, where to deposit marking agents such as ink or toner that form individual picture elements onto print media. To rasterize PDL, the printer includes a raster image processing (rasterizing) component.
Large print jobs as well as complex print jobs can be substantially time consuming to raster image process (RIP), even for a large commercial-size printer. This is because the rasterization process typically includes some combination of image decompression, color space conversion, half-toning, formatting, and compression operations to convert the PDL to device ready bits. In enterprise networks such as an organizational intranet, the amount of time that it takes to print a print job is generally of paramount importance. Time consuming rasterizing operations may tie up an enterprise's printer causing one or more user's substantial time delays as they wait for a print job to complete. For this reason, rasterizing large and/or complex print jobs in an enterprise network can be a costly undertaking.
To address this problem, one existing technique involves splitting a large and/or complex print job into multiple respective partitions. Respective ones of the partitions are then sent to different networked printers for rasterizing and printing. That is, each printer that RIPs a particular partition will also print that particular partition. Although this technique has effectively reduced the amount of rasterizing that any one printing device is required to perform to RIP a large and/or complex print job, this technique has a number of problems associated with it. For instance, since the print job is raster image processed (“RIP'd”, or “rasterized”) and printed at multiple different printers, a human being is typically required to gather the printed output from each of these multiple printers. As can be appreciated, this could become a considerably time consuming job to perform, especially as the numbers of printers across which a print job is distributed increases, and when one or more of the printers are geographically distant with respect to any other of the printers.